Saturday, March 31, 2018

Sixty-eight days from now—assuming all goes well—I will be
graduating with my masters in social work. That’s nine more weeks of
course-work. Seven more weeks of therapy clients. And then, it’s done.

This season of graduate school.

This season of living below the poverty line.

This season of Jeremy working ridiculous hours to support us.

It will all be over.

And I’m overjoyed.

But I can’t say goodbye to the hard parts of this season without also parting ways with some of
the good parts. That always catches me a bit off-guard. There's always grief associated with change. Even good change. It's a death of the way things used to be. Which is quite a paradox, isn't it?

Like, being a student. I’m going to miss being a student.

I love school. I love learning. I love showing up to a
classroom (in which I am not expected to teach) and just soaking up the
information. I love keeping my brain “on its toes.” Being challenged. Pushed.
Stretched. Academia can have a certain thrill to it, especially when it’s a
subject you care about. Or the content
you’re learning about in class is playing out in real-time on the news. There’s
always more to know and I think it's easy to get complacent where learning is not part of your job requirements.

There are also perks to being a student. Like student
discounts. Free bus and train passes. Free food on-campus. I’ve taken a dozen
boxes of pizza home at a time, bagged up those portions into freezer bags, and eaten that stuff for
weeks. There are perks like knowing you belong on campus at hockey games and
the library and the fitness center. For a short moment in a school’s history,
you are a student with full access to tenured professors and expensive journal
articles.

I’m going to miss being an intern.

There’s this love-hate relationship between only being an intern and just being an intern. In one way, it’s a
bummer that you’re not getting paid to do valuable work. In another way, if you
make a mistake, you are—after all—“just an intern” and there’s someone to
kindly get you back on-track. Interns get a certain level of license to misstep
and “get it wrong.” Sitting with my “boss” and being encouraged to express
insecurity and uncertainty is priceless. I can’t express how valuable that has
been this past year.

I’m going to miss Christmas vacation and spring break and
summer vacation. Yeah, that was nice while it lasted. In general, I just appreciate the variety and flexibility to my days. It's hard to get monotonous when your classes change each quarter.

Isn’t it interesting that as long as we may wish/long/thirst
for one season to end, we still grieve for pieces of that same exact season?

____________________________

There’s this song that always feels right at times like
this. It’s by Sara Groves. She alludes to the story in the Bible about the
Israelites. They were rescued from slavery under the rule of King Pharoah in
Egypt, but they eventually found themselves complaining about freedom, because
walking around in the dessert was also hard.

Life is rarely “either/or.”

It’s almost always “both/and.”

It’s easy to think things will be so much better “over
there”

Because this thing is so hard.

But it’s all relative, isn’t it. We can complain about the
weather in January and in July. It really doesn’t matter. We will usually
always find something to whine about.